Feigning Sleep

The full moon slides through the branches in a liquid velvet night

Radiated air creeps mysteriously fresh through my bedroom window

My lungs suck healing herbs and pretend not to notice

I fain sleep but reluctantly rise, mummy like, to record my witnessed truths.

Dark and light play in the moonlight dancing across my floor, across my life

A man on the TV has told us not to worry about the nuclear reactor’s apparent failure

Reassuring in his arrogance that “our” design is superior and not nearly so vulnerable

I think of the belly laughing at the cancer in the groin…so near, yet illusively far away.

Will Japanese babies be born now without their amazing shiny black hair?

Will someone sue someone because of the rise of cancer?

Will the dead illegal immigrant’s family win their lawsuit against the murdering border patrol?

Will the young couple go to jail for beating their apparently perfect baby to death?

Answers to this and more on the 11 o’clock news fails to comfort me now

So many questions loom ominous around my fitful brain

I wanted to make a difference in this life

Does my full hearted effort at greater love even count?

My husband of oh so many years and I finally enjoy our own company

Yet defend from each other our own distracted ways

We learn patience and comfort and acceptance like birds finding twigs for their nests

All trying instinctively to do what we can without measure.

My best friend and I age together and apart quite nicely

She grows thin, I grow fat, she grows ambitious, I grow acceptance

We compete, confuse, distance, admire and draw together again and again

To polish the mirror of our own reflection, to learn to be truthful and to court silence.

Our babies take to the flight we have so intended

But not so far or so heedlessly as to leave us totally behind

Excel in all ways, but do please return home

Without judgment for all you have sprung from and hopefully perfected.

The full moon circles the earth two days away from perigee

Apparently culmination if not ruination is at hand

But my not sleeping does not signal true waking

And I am comforted only by the light dancing with the darkness.